This is because a country's military strength is only one aspect of its
security. Wounding its people to keep the army going is in the long term
a path to weakness.

One issue he did not mention is that use of the military can harm a
country. The unjust war of aggression in Iraq has damaged the US,
though less than it damaged Iraq. The quagmired war in Afghanistan
may not have made Afghanistan much worse than it was 10 years ago, but
has not made it much better either, and it has damaged US security.

This court's jurisdiction covers Massachusetts and some other states.
Massachusetts was one of several states which had laws against recording
conversations without getting permission and tried to use them to
ban such recordings.

People have criticized Hazare in various ways. It is true that he is
connected with the BJP, the Hindu extremist party. Dalits have
condemned his movement as "upper caste", and maybe they are right.
Still, it is good to cut down on corruption.

It is possible that this amounts to a sort of protection racket, if
the guard companies encouraged the sabotage. That would be unjust,
but it's a smaller injustice than the massive damage Shell has done to
the people of those areas of Nigeria.

I don't expect this to have much effect on al Qa'ida. The specific
group that was headed by Osama bin Laden has done little for years
beyond make plans. The substance of al Qa'ida is an ideology rather
than a centralized organization, and as such, it cannot defeated
by attacking its leaders.

You can't determine that fact by looking at the toys themselves, but
their other flaw is obvious: they are a media tie-in. Giving kids
such toys is media manipulation, and it teaches them to find such
manipulation acceptable. It is better to teach your kids to resist.
This resistance will help them become good human beings instead of
good sheep.

He also argues for an obligation to intervene against Assad in Syria.
I would agree, if Syria had a viable armed rebellion as Libya did.
(The Libyan rebels could not have defeated Gaddafi without help, but
the point is that they held substantial territory on their own for
long enough to receive support.)

The Syrians don't have a rebellion, they have a nonviolent protest
movement, and that can't be aided by outside military force.

Since Obama has the sole authority to approve or reject the Keystone
XL pipeline, the White House protests at which hundreds continue to be
arrested will show whether he is capable of refusing to be the flunky
of the oil companies.

The CIA is censoring a book by a critic, banning him from stating things
that are already public knowledge, just to hamper criticism. This is part of a general Obama practice of defending even the
nastiest government practices.

While the rebels understandably would like to capture Sirte, is that
enough reason to attack a city whose population supports Gaddafi?
Simply encircling it on the land side and encouraging unarmed people
to leave the city is likely to be enough, now that Gaddafi has no
chance to win.

Walmart is trying to buy influence in Boston by giving money to local
charities, in order to overcome political opposition to its opening a
store there.

Anyone influenced by this is a fool, but there are lots of such fools.
For instance, there are people at MIT CSAIL who admire Bill Gates
because he gave money and got their part of the building named
"Gates". As if this were more important than the harm Microsoft
continues to do.

People should think of these "donations" as lobbying activities.
They will probably stop if Walmart's lobbying campaign succeeds.

The FBI has thousands of informers in mosques in the US, many of them blackmailed, trying to lure in would-be terrorists. Often it seems they manufacture the "terrorism", preying on confused people who would never have made a real plan on their own.

Since a year ago, we have seen many people and organizations make accusations against Wikileaks. Domscheit-Berg's accusations, coming as they did from an insider, sounded very bad. But now we see that he cannot be trusted and his accusations should not be believed. There are reports he is cooperating with the FBI. Perhaps his sabotage of Wikileaks' operations and his accusations were all part of that "cooperation".

Some aspects of these laws are specially cruel, but the basic point of not allowing illegal immigrants to remain does not seem wrong to me. Convincing US citizens to do the jobs formerly done by illegal immigrants may require increasing the wages and improving working conditions. It may also require job training, which I doubt these states have provided.

Student Paul Donnachie in Scotland was convicted of the crime of insulting and defacing (but only notionally) an Israeli student's Israeli flag. He also called Israel a "terrorist state" and called the other student a "terrorist".

Donnachie needs to learn that he does no good for the cause of peace by being crude. However, what he said about Israel is simple truth. Israel has committed acts which perfectly fit the usual definition of terrorism: for instance, the bombing of civilians in Gaza with the aim of making them drop their support for Hamas. Violence against civilians for a political purpose.

There is no reason to believe that the Israeli student Reitblat is personally a terrorist, so Donnachie owes him an apology for that. However, to punish mere insult as a crime violates the basic human right of freedom of speech.

I call it a stunt because it proves nothing significant about fracking
and safety. Even supposing that fluid is safe,
next month Halliburton could switch to something else, which isn't.
And it says nothing about other companies.

If a law required all companies to use a fracking fluid that is safe
for humans and other species, and that wouldn't pollute wells, and to
get approval of the ingredients to prove it, that would be more than a
stunt.

A crucial difference between Libya and Afghanistan is that the US set
up Karzai's "government" and is thus fully responsible for it,
including its corruption. The Libyan rebels' shaky government was not
set up by NATO even if NATO help create the opportunity for it to
exist, and NATO must avoid getting drawn into a role in setting one
up.

Horrible things may happen if Libyans do this badly, but Afghanistan
shows that horrible things could happen if NATO gets involved.

The megacorporations that want special tax breaks on their foreign
profits "to create jobs" refuse to say how many jobs they have in the
US, and how many in other countries.

But it seems they have cut almost 3 million US jobs in the past decade.
So it seems unlikely that they will go in the opposite direction.

The one kind of tax change that really would help jobs in the US is to
establish a national health care system. The current system of paying
for health care through employment discourages employing people in the
US.

The private prison operator CCA turned a prison sentence into a death sentence by denying medical care to a prisoner who had a heart attack. But this is just the worst example of CCA's cruelty. So the ACLU wants CCA's contract cancelled.

Parts of Tripoli have risen up against Gaddafi as the rebel troops outside close in.

I am sure the rebels will move as fast as they can; but as they advance into into the city, Gaddafi will have lots of opportunities to slow them down. I fear that his troops will crush the uprisings. Given their propensity to randomly shell civilian areas, I think they'd be glad to kill these anti-Gaddafi Libyans even if there is no hope they can win.

There needs to be a way for them to surrender instead — and provisions need to be made to heal the conflict with the tribes that have been Gaddafi's supporters.

I don't believe that countries are obliged to admit any number of poor migrants. BUt these are not ordinary migrants. They are refugees from Mugabes tyranny, which is supported by South Africa.

Meahwhile, nothing can excuse telling these women to "get a job" when there are no jobs and they have no papers, or "find a decent house" when they are destitute, or demanding they pay to take a class. (Whose idea was that fee? The IMF's?) If South Africa wants to have a policy of taking the children of destitute refugees, it should come out and say so, not set up a catch-22 for them.

I also wonder what conditions these children are being kept in. I have a feeling that institutions for poor children in South Africa are also not very good conditions to bring up a child. Are they better than standing with mom at an intersection to beg?

That is good, but what about those of us who are men, or who are not Muslims? The right to cover one's face in public should not be limited to women, or to those with religious motivations. If face recognition cameras are set up in the streets, covering your face will be the only way to resist total surveillance.

By choosing to prosecute these protesters, instead of making Fortnum & Mason pay taxes as they demanded, the UK government shows that it values the budget deficit as an excuse to make poor people suffer.

By treating possession of leaflets — proof of a political role — as an "aggravating" factor, it shows that the real defendent here is the idea of protest, and reaffirm that "aggravated trespass" is just an excuse to prosecute protesters.

When companies want to conceal things, they typically claim they need
to keep secrets from their competitors. Even if that is indeed one of
their motives, there is no reason to grant it any validity in an issue
of public safety or health. When those are at stake, or any issue
more important than the profit of any one company, businesses should
be required to reveal any information that the public needs.

However, I think this reason is a front. If all the companies in a
certain field were required to publish certain information, each
company would gain something and lose something. If he can see your
secrets, that is compensated by the fact that you can see his secrets.
Once each company knows all, they would all become more efficient.
Why would they object strenuously to this?

My theory is that what they really want is to keep their dangerous
practices secret from the public, but they can't admit that, so they
talk about keeping secrets from each other, and politicians whose
support has been procured in some other way can cite this as their
public reason.

The solution to this is lear: a single-payer system as in Canada or England. Those systems work fine, except when right-wing governments try to sabotage them, and even then they are still better than the US system.

I suppose that if he isn't ready to stop in 15 days, they will be compelled to extend the permission, or else play out the same hand that they lost last time. However, what's really important is ending the corruption. That is a hard fight, but the support that Hazare has gained through his arrest may help.

Maybe CCTV can be used to identify large numbers of rioters and prosecute them. But that is the wrong thing to do, since it seeks to bottle up the pressure that other unjust government policies create.

If CCTV can identify the banksters and bring them to justice, then it might be of some use.

The most powerful potential US military adversary, China, has one aircraft carrier that belonged to Ukraine in the 90s. Does the US need 11 carrier groups? Does it need an army that could fight all the world's other armies put together?

Maybe there is a reason for that. Maybe the Washington power elite is planning to do something so horrible that the whole rest of the world would want to attack. Broiling our planet, perhaps?

The only motive I can imagine for him to conceal this is if Bush or Cheney had ordered him to conceal that information; and the only plausible motive for that is if they were somehow complicit in the attacks.

This is not proof. There might be some other explanation that doesn't suggest itself to me. But this is enough reason to have a new investigation — a thorough and honest one this time. (Bush's investigation was hamstrung and corrupted.) That is why I signed the ae911truth.org petition for a new investigation.

Using a subsidized farm crop to make fuel means it gets grown instead of food, and that drives food prices up. Meanwhile, growing this corn is not very efficient, so it doesn't do much to reduce global heating.

Watching TV may lead to earlier death. Or perhaps people watch TV because of something else that causes a tendency to die earlier.

If sitting a lot leads to earlier death, I hope that my working 10 hours a day on the computer doesn't have the same effect. Unlike TV, which I more or less do without, the work I do on the computer is important, and I would not want to leave it undone.

If it were established that this spending did make Americans safer overall, some parts of it might be exceptions. For instance, I am sure that the conquest and occupation of Iraq had the opposite effect.

But even if it were possible to make Americans safer through a war of conquest and occupation, that would not make it legitimate.

US citizens: tell congressional leaders they should insist that the members of the deficit-cutting committee stop accepting funds from military contractors, and publish details of any meetings with those contractors' representatives.

The article is mistaken about a crucial fact: aside from special "enterprise" systems which the rioters generally did not have, RIM can decrypt these messages, and the police can subpoena the decrypted messages from RIM.

The police know this. So why would they ask code-breakers to go to work on these messages? The only plausible motive I can see is to avoid the need to show cause for subpoenas — and that is contempt of justice. Either that, or this is just PR, following the general strategy of using the riots to distract attention from the banksters' much bigger looting, and far more numerous killings by the police.

American voters have nearly always rejected school vouchers, and unless it has changed recently, public opinion opposes it. Republicans get away with this and many other policies that Americans don't like because the mainstream media distract attention from them.

We knew there was lots of corruption in Iraq; Cheney set the tone for it. This shows the corruption used torture to protect itself. It also shows that torture was a systematic machine, greased and ready to be applied to anyone including heroic and patriotic Americans.

The existence of a torture machine threatens everyone and everything. Once it is running, its victims can't be limited to Iraqi rebels (not to say torturing them is excusable, but some such as Obama may not care about them).

I wonder who stopped the FBI from investigating and prosecuting. Surely it would have wanted to protect its informants. Only someone very high up could have stopped it. Cheney, perhaps?

This victory shows that enough pressure from users can make Facebook stop it too.

I intentionally did not use these companies' spin terminology to describe this practice. Their spin terminology makes it sound like this is a way to help users connect rather than what it is: exploitation of them.

Obama's committee to study fracking was told to presume it can be done safely, and not to investigate whether that is true. Then it was packed with people who get money from companies that do fracking.

We need leaders who can dare tell any company to take a flying leap. To restore democracy, lots of companies are going to have to do this. Anyone who hesitates too long before giving that command can't possibly do the job.

Contrasting Anarchism with the disorder: an Anarchist take on the UK riots.

I sympathize with Anarchism, and I like to see parts and aspects of society work well through mutual aid, but I think we need a state so we can tax the rich and restrain their power. (That's what democracy means.)

Obama has continued increasing military spending. If there is no budget deal, the default reductions of the debt-ceiling agreement would reduce military spending to the level of 2007. It would still be a lot higher than during the Cold War.

If we are to have cuts, we should cut the military more than that. Military spending produces fewer jobs than other government spending, so we should take all the cuts from the military.

To do even better, we could cut the military further, and increase social spending, all within the unwise requirements of the debt ceiling deal. If we do this enough, we could stimulate the economy, which is what it needs.

The UK riots reflect the existence of an underclass which has no opportunity and sees that the police hate it. The UK must focus on removing the pressure which led to the riots, not on how to bottle it up better. These fires will burn themselves out, but running society for the wealthy few will keep starting new ones.

The London riots are the result of a system of great inequality, leaving large parts of society with no opportunity to escape squalor, together with a history of hundreds of unpunished killings by police.

This seems to be one area where Obama really does something good. I wonder how long it will take before the Tea Party attacks it. If they are against making lightbulbs more efficient, it would only be natural for them to take the same stand for cars and trucks, and everything else.

These riots seem to consist mostly of looting local businesses, reminding me of the riots in Watts in the 1960s. There is nothing ethical, let alone heroic, in these explosions. However, it would be folly to ignore the causes, which have to do with government policies.

That area is part of "Area C", the area in which the Israeli army maintains total control. The UN has documented the persistent systematic oppression of Palestinians in area C, designed to make them move away.

The police deserve this rage, and so does the state which practices Hooverlike authority during a depression, but the rioters attack others who just happen to be at hand. That's wrong and will cause suffering to innocents.

Converting to renewable energy is a necessity. What would these countries do if there were a Fukushima-like disaster near their factories? Of course, they would demand to place the costs on others and not them, but even after achieving that it would hurt their production. When companies demand short-term goals override long-term needs, that makes them enemies of society.

These companies deserve to be picketed in other countries.

Meanwhile, the fact that companies can do this illustrates the damage that "free trade" treaties do.

The Mujahideen-e Khalq has paid millions in speaking fees to former US officials. Any relationship whatsoever with that organization is supposed to be a crime, since that organization is on the "terrorist" list, but the US seems ready to accept excuses in this case.

The Mujahideen-e Khalq may well deserve the label of "terrorist", but it was never given a trial to prove it should be in this list. That is one injustice. And even if it is proved to be a terrorist organization, punishing any and all contact with it is too much.

In the future, the US will label all organizations as "terrorist", and punish those associated with any organization if and when it wishes to.

I don't criticize the EFF for pushing to ameliorate some details of the deal less bad. Hollywood will resist all these suggestions, but it doesn't hurt to try.

What would hurt is to let these details distract us from the basic evil of this deal, regardless of excuses. Censorship is evil, and making it a little less bad does not make it acceptable. We must get rid of this deal.

I wonder if a state could ban ISPs from acting in accord with this deal. That is something worth pushing for.

The foreign troops that gained territory in Mogadishu should not be called "peacekeepers" — that is blackwhiting (see 1984). They are a foreign intervention that aims to impose a foreign-backed "government" which has hardly any popular support among the people it now tries to rule.

I don't know how much popular support al Shabaab has, but it can't be less.

Right-wing Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin asserted, without proof, that the Oslo massacre was carried out by al Qa'ida. When this proved false, she insisted she was right in spirit anyway. She was criticized for this.

The paper's ombudsman defended her, and said her critics (who called for accurate and factual reporting) were no different from right-wing hate-mongers.

The article misleads by using the term "intellectual property" to describe what this treaty would do. If you think that tells you something about the treaty, it means you have have been misled by confusion of that term.

Cutting the deficit now is stupid and harmful economic policy, and aside from discussing which way is better or worse, we should continue to condemn politicians who voted that decision and demand that they change it.

US citizens: phone your senators via (202) 244-3121 to say they should oppose provisions in H.R. 1540 that would make imprisonment without trial the permanent policy of the US. They should close the Guantanamo prison, end the practice of imprisonment without trial in the US, and give every prisoner a real trial (not a military kangaroo court) or release him.

The ultimate joke is that Obama is a center-right politician who would hardly do anything controversial. This is the standard right-wing tactic of condemning a position a little less right-wing "Liberal" to distract from real Liberal positions.

The US rich have been fighting a class war against most Americans for years. Americans need to fight back: tax the rich and their businesses, and break up those businesses, and terminate the unfair treaties they have imposed.

I estimated in 2004 that there might be 100,000 patented ideas implemented in GNU/Linux. Dan Ravisher found 286 patented ideas in Linux, and a magazine estimated Linux was .25 percent of the GNU/Linux system at that time; multiplying 300 by 400 gives 120,000.

Since this is just an estimate, it is clearer to present it as 100,000 and avoid an impression of any greater precision.

The article suggests a technical solution, as the authors choose not to focus on the real issue that Canada has an efficient single-payer system where the US has wasteful and greedy insurance companies.

Many Israelis are in the streets protesting the high cost of living. They mostly don't talk about the fact this is due to the tremendous subsidy given to the colonies in the West Bank. 2 billion shekels of annual subsidy is over half a billion dollars.

I put "illegal" in quotes because all the settlements violate treaties about the treatment of conquered peoples. The "illegal" settlements are illegal under Israeli law also. But the government supports them too.

That false accusation would only have caused a brief annoyance if it had not been followed by repeated violations of the couple's rights. Suing Wal-Mart is appropriate, but while that might teach the store a lesson about making false accusations, it won't teach the "justice" system anything about handling them.

The article is mistaken about one thing. What stimulates the evolution of Roundup-resistant weeds is not the presence of GMO genes in crops, but the use of Roundup. To stop the process, it would be enough to stop using Roundup. It would not be necessary to eliminate those genes where they have spread to other fields.

A senate committee is voting on extended warrantless wiretapping authority, while the public is distracted by the debt-ceiling pseudocrisis. The votes will be secret for 3 weeks, but each senator can say how he voted.

It is legitimate to punish people who call for the murder of others. The politicians who voted to invade and conquer Iraq should not be murdered. They are entitled to a fair trial. If convicted of the crime of aggressive war, they should be imprisoned for life, not executed, because the death penalty is barbaric.

However, the conviction for "collecting documents" is just an excuse to punish people for what they are presumed to be thinking.

If it is true, it would be poetic justice for Bush and his war of conquest. Whether it is any good for Iraqis, I suppose it depends on what Iran does with this power.

However, I am not sure the report should be believed, simply because it says nothing about Muqtada al-Sadr, who is very powerful in Iraq. Although he is a Shi'ite, his power base is Iraq; I have doubts he would want to be a puppet for Iran's rulers. I could always be wrong, but the article doesn't address this and that makes me doubt.

Our society tends to overreact to any perceived danger to "our little babies" (even if they are teenagers), and this provides an easy route to manipulate society into dangerous and unjust practices, such as censorship.

An Israeli peace advocate compares the two boycott movements: Gush Shalom's boycott of products of the Israeli colonies in the West Bank, and the broad PACBI boycott of Israeli institutions.

He notes that the latter boycott, which I agreed to follow in my recent visit to Palestine and Israel, effectively rejects the whole Israeli peace camp. That is why I think that boycott is too broad. I support Gush Shalom and its boycott.

The Palestinian organizers of the broader boycott have indeed given up on nearly all of the Israeli left. They have concluded that trying to work with the Israeli left is useless, because it failed before. I can't deny that it failed, but I disagree with the view that Israeli support for justice for Palestinians is irrelevant.

The broadest sensible definition of "terrorism" is "violence against civilians in general, used as a political tactic." By that definition, the massacre is terrorism but just barely. It was aimed at a specific political party rather than at Norwegians in general.

Some experiments suggest that the mental faculty of making decisions carefully (cognitive control) gets temporarily fatigued each time it is used. For poor people, many small daily decisions require this faculty, so it is fatigued much of the time.

The idea of putting human genes into monkeys and producing an animal a little more similar to humans distresses some people.

It is very unlikely such experiments would result in an animal with mental characteristics that would make it count as human. If so, it would deserve certain rights in accord with those characteristics. Provided we respect those rights, what is there to be upset about? People produce children with random combinations of genes every day.

This may not have affected the verdict, since she was acquitted of the murder charge, and this evidence might not be relevant to the lesser charges she was convicted of. But if there is no conviction to overturn as a consequence, what will teach these prosecutors and others not to lie in court again? Next time they might succeed in framing someone.

To prevent that, we need to punish them, but how? Can they be disbarred for this?

The movie companies that shut down the sharing site kino.to, then insulted and threatened its users, wanted to prove how much money they had "lost" (more correctly, not gained) because of the site's operation. They buried the results because they suggest that it tended to increase their income.

Coal companies do not like being criticized. They threaten to punish the University of Wyoming for a sculpture that links the burning of coal, through global heating, to the infestation that is destroying most of the pine forests.

The coal companies say the university should show "gratitude" for its funds, but since when does gratitude include keeping silent about a practice that endangers our world?

I don't oppose the application of copyright to commercial redistribution (except for practical use works, since those ought to be free). However, extrajudicial punishment of anything whatsoever is a threat to basic principles of justice.

This is possible in the UK because of its unjust extradition treaty with the US, which abolished the usual safeguards on extradition. I am not sure the US can get away with this anywhere but in the UK. This is another reason why the UK must cancel its unjust extradition treaty with the US.

Now that free workers have to compete with prison labor, that keeps wages down in the US. Business must appreciate that too.

The usefulness of prisoners for business means that business promotes, and partly pays for, imprisonment. This encourages the state to imprison more people. It amounts to a predatory system, imprisoning people because it can.

The only wrongdoers here are JSTOR and the journals it hosts. They ought to make the articles available to the general public, with freedom to redistribute. And if they don't do this voluntarily, society should impose it.

Why does Kennedy deny he acted as an agent provocateur? Perhaps it is a question of semantics. The term "agent provocateur" normally refers to someone who cynically tries to lure dissidents into actions that would hurt their cause. Perhaps Kennedy had come to sympathize with them enough that he wasn't seeking to hurt them, and didn't expect them to be prosecuted once he supplied his exculpatory evidence. They were in fact prosecuted because the prosecutors withheld that evidence from the defense.

If there were a signal that could shut off cameras, cops in countries from the US to Syria would broadcast that signal when they attack protesters. Of course, people would prefer cameras that don't respond to the signal, and this suggests someone has in mind to force cameras to implement it.

Nonfree software can impose whatever restrictions its developer's heart desires. It is only a small step from today's Digital Restrictions Management, that restricts what you can do with images you get from others, to future features that would restrict what you can do with images you make.

This law has some beneficial provisions but overall it was a sellout to insurance and the drug companies. It ought to be completely replaced with a single-payer plan. Whether court invalidation of this law is likely to lead there, I can't begin to guess, so I will leave such tactical speculation to others.

I sometimes have sagging pants when I board a flight. That's because sometimes the "security" guards put me in jail by making me remove my belt. Then I am in jail for the whole trip and can't put my belt back on.

If a law requires the US and the American public to know the underlying source of information and identity of those attempting to influence US policy and laws — when they work for a foreign government — then we should apply the same policy to the larger, wealthier and more dangerous threats to our democracy: multinational corporations.

I wonder when they will start fighting against building codes. Shouldn't you be free to build a building that will fall down if there is an earthquake? The market will convince landlords to tear down and replace such buildings — if something reminds buyers and renters to think about the issue. Unless there is a housing shortage.

The suspicion of vaccination described in the article is part of the general lunacy associated with religion, and religion bears the principle blame for it. Nonetheless, it is valid to argue that activities likely to trigger that lunatic suspicion are harmful.

This law could definitely do harm. If a child runs away from home, a parent might very well regard escalating immediately to the police as crude and harmful to their relationship. I think that scenario is likely to be far more common than murders such as Casey Anthony was accused of.

The U SAP AT RIOT act is another example of a harmful hasty legal reaction.

An article on a site I won't link to said that the Afghan parliament is talking about impeaching Karzai. But I can't see how they could find anyone to replace him with. Is there any honest politician in the Afghan government? Fighting to prop the government up is futile.

In other words, they want to conscript every internet subscriber into acting as a copyright enforcer.

To attack sharing is to attack everyone. That is what the US government is now doing. Americans' goal should be to make the attack fail to achieve its aim.

One way to do so is to keep your WiFi network with no key. The ISP may eventually bother you about it, but you can expect to forestall it once by saying, "I had no key on my WiFi network." Wait till they actually threaten to do something and not just complain. With any luck, by the time the ISP bothers you a second time, enough to matter, some of your room-mates will have changed, and you can drop the service and someone else can subscribe instead.

Another good response, that will also save you money, is to disconnect your broadband service. If you don't do file sharing, a slower connection will be good enough. Tell the ISP you have dropped your service because of their unjust agreement with Hollywood.

Investigations into crimes such as arson justify search warrants and subpoenas. But the people whose data is searched should be entitled to a notification, and a chance to try to quash the subpoenas in court.

The simple answer is: because politicians are not really interested in the deficit. Republicans want to cut spending that helps most Americans because they want to transfer wealth from most Americans to the rich, and especially to business. They mention the deficit only to achieve this aim.

Attaching medical care to employment is harmful to Americans in two ways. It is directly harmful for workers because they lose coverage if unemployed. It is indirectly harmful because it acts as an incentive for business to reduce employment. A national health care system, funded by taxes not based on the number of employees, would encourage employment as well as avoid wasteful administrative cost.

If the US fails to do this, other countries will have the duty to do it.

Japanese soldiers were executed after World War II for waterboarding prisoners. Capital punishment is an injustice, so they should have got life imprisonment. Bush, who has confessed his guilt, deserves the same.

In the current situation, this would eliminate a recurring hostage for the Republicans, which would be a change for the better. However, in the long term it seems like a bad idea to increase the president's power.

If this war were necessary, and if victory were possible, this setback would not be a reason to give up. However, the article explains why victory is impossible: the "Afghan government" is regarded as a bunch of racketeers because that's what it is. Ahmed Wali Karzai was one of the biggest racketeers.

All the "free trade" treaties are daggers stuck into democracy. International trade benefits everyone as long as it does not give business any political power, but "free trade" treaties are designed precisely to do that harm.

That article also explains how the "Somali government" set up by the US extends the area of Mogadishu it controls by bombing neighborhoods into rubble. Maybe someday it will control all the present-day area of Mogadishu, but the inhabitants will have perforce extended the city elsewhere, unless they have been killed.

This is, in effect, using hunger as a weapon against regions in which groups labeled "terrorist" operate, somewhat like the siege of Gaza.

These laws do not prohibit aid to terrorists. They prohibit aid to groups labeled by the US as terrorists. Are the Somalian groups that oppose the US-imposed "government" really terrorists? I don't know.

I am not sure whether this operation was good or bad, in principle. However, it was wrong to give children in Nawa Sher just one dose of vaccine when three are needed. Their families may think that their children have been properly vaccinated.

The Collateral Murder video shows the
results of an illegal
order,
according to a soldier who was there. If Bradley Manning leaked
this
video, he acted based on recognizing the need to fight these crimes.

The reason is obvious: Republican budget cutting. Obama said two years ago that he would stimulate the economy, but he has not strongly opposed the budget cutting; he has even adopted a budget-cutting commission, granting that foolish goal legitimacy. Either he's a weakling, or a fool, or he never gave a damn.

We can't trust what oil companies say about safety. They always say, "We maintain the highest safety standards," and that statement is worth exactly nothing.

The only way underwater drilling can be safe is if the drillers are monitored like prisoners on a chain gang — and if the inspectors care as little about the company's profit as the guards care about the prisoners' comfort.

Calling them "radicals" is a typical example of the lie that is told every day about anyone who criticizes Israeli policy. They surely are pro-Palestinian, but that does not mean they are against Israel.

There are two separate issues here: DuPont's decision not to use a slightly safer but more expensive process, and its failure to properly maintain the equipment it used.

I concur with the former decision. It is not cost-efficient to spend 2 million dollars (or perhaps more) to prevent a probable 14 deaths over a period of 10,000 years, if that's what it would really do. 2 million dollars could save hundreds of thousands of lives if spent efficiently, for instance food and medicine for poor people.

However, having chosen to continue with the existing plant, DuPont had the responsibility to maintain it properly. The fact that someone died in the plant a mere 23 years after the report projected 14 deaths in 10,000 years suggests that the true danger level of the plant as actually operated by DuPont is a lot higher than that.

Perhaps the safer process would be cheaper than proper maintenance over time for the existing plant.

I hope this is a big success. My only (small) criticisms are linguistic: they wrote "it's" where they meant "its" (think "his, her, its" — no apostrophe in any of them), and they used the deprecating term "content" to talk about their own film.

This fits into a systematic decades-long right-wing assault on the standard of living of most Americans. With more poverty, they will have more crime, put more Americans in prison, and cut wages more, to make more poverty.

A school teacher, a Tea Partier, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In
the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The
CEO takes 11 cookies, then looks at the Tea Partier and says, "Watch
out for that teacher — she wants a piece of your cookie!"

I don't think that this happened through a natural phenomenon. I suspect that the businesses that don't want to pay the carbon tax have funded manipulation of public opinion on this issue. We know that prominent global heating deniers have been funded by oil companies.

Global Patronage:
This describes
the Global Patronage system of supporting artists on
the Internet. Francis Muguet and I were working on it together at the
time of his death in September 2009. He sent me a draft for version
1.2.1, and I responded with this modified version which I call 1.3.
The principal change was to describe correctly what sort of function
would be used to calculate the shares of the non-attributed funds.
I did not expect him to have any objections, but he died before
responding. (French
Translation)

Food given to the state will certainly go first to the army, which is somewhat hungry, and only trickle-down will reach the civilians who are starving. This not only supports the evil state, it also fails to do the job of feeding them.

Will the North Korean state agree to let food be delivered in some other way, if that's the only offer?

Europe compelled Greece to adopt an austerity package by offering this bailout. Now that the Greek government has passed the austerity package, the bailout plan will be withdrawn. Will this be a bait-and-switch to make the Greek government heap more austerity on Greeks?

This is the mirror image of the extremist Islamist view that endorses suicide bombings of civilians.

In Israel, expressing such views is apparently a crime, and the rabbis were (after a long delay) questioned by the police. I think it is wrong to prohibit expression of abstract political views. What Israel needs to do is not the prosecution of the people that express such views, but rather the end of public support now given to the movements that tend to produce them.

However, it is true that they kept their raw data secret, and that is not good for science.

The article uses the term "intellectual property", which here (as nearly always) causes gratuitous confusion because it can mean so many different things. I think that here it means "trade secrets", but most of the time it means other things. This term has no place in thoughtful discussion, so please join me in totally avoiding its use.

When Herisse was driving wildly, he was an immediate threat to
people's lives. I don't know whether this changed when he stopped the
car. I can't say it was wrong to shoot him dead — there may
have been a valid reason. But shooting him with a crowd of bystanders
behind him is hardly a way to protect public safety.

US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call for an end to production of C-17 transport planes, which outgoing defense secretary Gates says are not needed. Many in congress want to spend money on these planes for the sake of companies in their districts.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

I didn't give any credence to these accusations until I read that the ICC did. They are very clearly the sort of thing that is used to manipulate public opinion. So my views about Libya were never based on them.

This is partly due to the high level of unemployment, partly due to decades of campaigns to weaken unions, and partly due to globalization which was engineered through antidemocratic international institutions such as the WTO.

Even though this did not cause immediate danger, it did make the plant unable to deliver electricity. Since one effect of overfishing and other human abuse of the ocean is an increase in jellyfish, this is going to make nuclear power plants less efficient over the next few decades.

The headline says he "received" the money, but the text seems to show this is a matter of research funding rather than personal payments to him. Nonetheless, it is an ethical issue.

I am not surprised Exxon (remember the "xx" is pronounced like "ch" in German "ach") funds "hundreds of organisations". Funding just one wouldn't achieve the purpose of distracting humanity from the disaster it needs urgently to avoid. Exxon, yexx!

Imagine if the photo had been published in a newspaper. That could turn thousands of people into criminals.

Doing foreplay in a dance is a little daring — it must have been fun. It suggests those two students are normal teenagers with a normal interest in sex. If there was anything harmful, wrong, or shameful about this photo, it wasn't them. Yet (according to an article on a site not suitable to link to) they might face prosecution, with the danger of being listed as "sex offenders", effectively "perverts", for being normal and hurting nobody.

These laws are the perverted intersection of two irrational hot buttons: "sex is dirty" and "we must protect the children". Remember this when Internet filtering is imposed in order to block "child pornography".

People suspect the TSA is playing a dishonest word game to evade responsibility for its actions. Whatever the TSA demands, they pretend it is "not required" because you have the option of missing your flight. These lies won't fool anyone who pays attention, but they hope to fool many people who listen to a soundbite.

This issue is a pertinent one for technologies that consume water. However, this presentation tries to generalize the idea too far. It is ridiculous to talk about the amount of water needed for hydroelectric generation, because people build dams where water already flows downhill — and the water that flows through the generator is not used up in the process. It remains available for other uses.

Of course, the US government knows that that is irrelevant, since bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza is not aiding Hamas. It is engaged in evident dishonesty comparable to what Bush used to do to defend his lies about Iraq.

She was accused of "obstructing" their activities, but how could
making a video possibly do that? Perhaps if they were planning to do
something illegal, or lie about their actions. Such lies on the part
of cops are not unusual.

We all understand that the wishes of businesses and investors carry more weight with the US Congress than the wishes of citizens. That means democracy is sick. I am glad to see investors oppose this fundamentally unjust bill, since they may be able to kill it. The same sickness of democracy gave Hollywood and the record companies the power which they are using to try to pass it.

While we can be glad that some of these non-citizens are using their power on our side, we must not let that lead us to tolerate corporatocracy.

It is very hard to speak with the precision that this court punished her for failing to use. I try to do so, but I don't always succeed. However, even if she carelessly stretched her statement, that does not justify imprisonment.

If we would like to discourage exaggeration, harsh punishments against a few of those who succumb to this pressure will not do the job (in addition to being unjust). Changing the structure of the system might perhaps work.

I see a flaw in the Times' argument that FAIR didn't point out. The article cites a police chief and a deputy fire chief as examples — but those are managers. Normally they would not even be members of the union, and their salary and pension have nothing to do with those of ordinary policemen or firemen.

Foreign maids working in Saudi Arabia are effectively slaves, since they are forbidden to return home without the consent of their employer. If that employer is cruel, doesn't pay the salary, or rapes them, they have no way to escape.

No matter what crimes a person may be guilty of, disappearing him is never justified — and the fact that these people have been disappeared, and that Ai Weiwei has been gagged as a condition of parole, is grounds to believe the worst accusations against the Chinese Government.

Obama raised the official US troop strength in Afghanistan from 34,000 to 100,000, and this is not counting the 100,000 contractors or mercenaries. Thus, withdrawing 33,000 would still leave more forces than Bush had there.

Insults are not nice, and racism is disgusting, but prosecuting people
for speaking insults is even more disgusting. It sounds like this man
was (and maybe still is) a prize jerk, but that should not be a crime.

Note the ridiculous argument that drilling near Greenland is safe
because wells have been drilled in Norway's Arctic. Were they safe,
or just lucky? If a well in the Barents Sea had blown up, could
Norway have shut it off and cleaned up the spill?

Of 6 million hectares of land stolen during Colombia's civil war, the
restitution law will
only restore 2 million to the previous
owners.
The government does not intend to return the land which was taken by
companies or by the state itself.

I can't say that this company is doing something unjust. If the
outcome is harmful, I would blame it on the competitivity of the job
market in the US, which is caused by practices such as outsourcing,
budget-cutting, and banksterism.

UK police say their censorship efforts have "safeguarded or protected"
414 children in the past year,
but fail to say what this means, or
how the danger to those children
related to the pornography. Were these children being used to make
pornography? Stopping that would indeed be protecting them, but the
police had achieved this, they could have stated it in a clear and
concrete way. The vagueness of the statement suggests that they are
stretching things. My researcher was unable to find any details.

The UK government is not greatly concerned with children's welfare in
general, as shown by its other actions. For instance,
closing homes
for orphans.
In 2010 there were around 6900 children in state-managed homes in the UK.
I'm not sure how many of them would be forced onto the street by this
closure.

US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Shareholder
Protection Act, which would require shareholders to approve political
campaign spending by corporations.
This page
gives more info and
other suggestions for action.

The Capitol Switchboard
numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

Battery farms, where animals don't have space to move, endanger human
lives because only with antibiotics can the animals avoid sickness.

Thus, banning the distribution of antibiotics to farm animals would
benefit humans in several ways. First, they would preserve the
function of antibiotics for when we need them. Second, they would
make meat more expensive in the developed countries where these
battery farms are, so most people in these countries would eat less
meat (which is good for health). Third, it would make farming more
efficient, which would help provide enough food for everyone in poor
countries. Fourth, it would reduce global warming.

US citizens: phone your senators to oppose S.978 which would punish
unauthorized streaming with imprisonment. Also send them
email
through this page.

As the article explains, people who post lipsynching or karaoke videos
could be imprisoned under this bill. But even if it were corrected to
avoid that, it would still be an injustice.

I used the following message text:

As your constituent, I urge you to reject S. 978. Copyright law is
already too restrictive for the public, and S.978 would make it worse.
That's going in the wrong direction. Please represent the people,
not Hollywood special interests.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and
888-355-3588.

Civil forfeiture was invented to evade the constitutional protection against punishing you without convicting you of a crime. The government takes your property on the grounds it was used in a crime, without trying to prove you committed a crime, and says that is OK because it isn't punishment.

This is unfair when applied to domain names, and equally so when applied to physical property. To restore human rights, the US must end civil forfeiture.

This reminds me of the Abu Ghraib torture photos. It seems that soldiers who get involved in war crimes have an irresistible yearning to boast about them. If they were clever, they would avoid preserving (or even making) such evidence. Maybe these soldiers, like violent street criminals, tend to be stupid.

I believe that cocaine addicts should be able to get their drug from doctors, but I am not necessarily in favor of legalizing commercial sale of cocaine. However, maybe it needs to be legalized if only to prevent the damage that the War on Drugs does to society. Nothing is going to stop drug traffickers from finding ways to legitimize their money; they have so much to pay to whoever helps that they can corrupt people in almost any social role. The only thing that can stop them is to undercut their captive market of addicts.

Will antiabortionists be prosecuted for posting images of fetuses? (They certainly should know that these images can cause emotional distress.) Probably not — because the ban will be selectively enforced by right-wing Christians.

Six friends of mine died in the past two years. I miss them, and I wish they were still alive and well. But I wouldn't force them to stay alive if they were suffering and death were their only way out.

Maybe that car's driver was an armed robber — I don't know. But that could not justify threatening bystanders, or trying to stop them from recording what the police were doing. The police are doing a public job, in public, so they are not entitled to privacy. If they are doing nothing wrong, why don't they want to be filmed?

This seems almost too good to be true, and I worry that there is a hole in this argument. If the low profits from cattle ranching are enough to drive deforestation in the Amazon, won't higher profits from palm oil drive more deforestation?

The article makes a mistake when it presents this as a change in the Internet itself. The Internet is no different, except where tyrannical states such as France, Spain, China and the US impose censorship. What has changed is that many (maybe most) people use the Internet in new ways that do tremendous surveillance.

It is possible to refuse — I do. I don't use most of the web sites that do surveillance. I fetch pages with wget so that sites know only that someone fetched the page. I don't have a spyPhone so it can't tell anyone anything about where I am.

Google and Facebook have very little data about me; I never identify myself to Google, and I use it from various computers that others use too. And if I want to visit a page that appears in a Google search, I don't click on the link (since that is set up to inform Google you clicked there). Instead I copy the address and go to it. If Google tracks me, it must think I am not very interested in most things I search for.

While this is a crowning unfairness, fixing this would at best mean that some people rotate more often in and out of unemployment. The US must do more to help the long-term unemployed and underemployed.

In a town in Syria, some of the suppression forces apparently refused to shoot the people, and the other suppression forces fought them and the people came out to defend them. Now the population has either fled or remains in hiding.

I supported and still support ending the US military's discrimination against homosexuals, but there were many campaign actions I would not sign and did not post here, because they described this as "serving their country" and we know that in Iraq they were serving the oil companies.

To really solve this problem requires new laws; however, the WTO stands in the way. Someday we can blame the WTO for the extinction of thousands of species (and perhaps the deaths of tens of millions of people as a result).

The intervention in Libya is necessary for other reasons. If Gaddafi had put down the insurrection, he would have used his oil to make Europe suck up to him again. However, I would not expect Obama to take action for reasons like that.

My understanding is that customers were (and still are) not liable when banks paid forged checks. The bank must absorb those losses. If so, this represents another way in which the move to the Internet has provided companies an opportunity to increase their rights at the expense of individuals' rights.

The old policy was chosen for society's good. For the client, fraud against his bank account is an unpredictable disaster; for the bank, it is a steady loss which the bank can cope with (by adjusting interest rates and feeds) and can also take measures to reduce. Thus, it is better to put this liability on the bank.

Nowadays, governments are too much under the control of business to employ such reasoning to choose good policies.

I too avoid buying bottled water almost completely when in countries where tap water is safe to drink. One method I use is to refill water bottles with tap water. Where tap water is not safe, I often refill a water bottle from some other supply of drinking water, such as a large bottle or purified water.

Norway, where abortion is completely integrated into the national health system, is also the best country to be a mother in. The US, in which Christian fanatics create obstacles for abortion, is the worst of the developed countries to be a mother in.

This is not a coincidence. The Christian fanatics' hatred is expressed in cruelty to poor children.

Facebook says that it only suggests identifications for faces in photos for people who are the user's friends. However, it might run the algorithm over every photo posted and not publicly announce the results.

German and Japanese doctors were convicted of war crimes for gruesome medical experiments. It is a shame those responsible for this outrage were not similarly prosecuted.

I am puzzled that the victims were not diagnosed and treated in the meanwhile, and likewise the children that inherited the disease. Why not?

It does not surprise me that this study yielded no useful information. That should have been obvious in advance. Plenty of people contract syphilis without medical intervention, and testing penicillin on them would be just as good an experiment.

The Koch brothers' business was crucial in a decades-long campaign to deregulate oil speculation, which is now a large part of that business.

I don't sympathize much with Americans who complain about "pain at the pump." Americans need to reduce their use of gasoline. However, to make that happen calls for a gradual and predictable price increase such as we could get with a carbon tax, not speculative price spikes.

I wonder if it might also be responsible for the big increase in violent crime in the 60s. I think that far more Americans drove cars starting around 1950 than before. This would have meant a lot more lead in the air, especially in cities.

I wish I could believe that the IMF has reversed its decades-long
policy
of pushing austerity that leads to recession, but a priori it seems
more
likely this is some sort of aberration. I would be glad to see
an analysis from someone who understands.

The Indian government is very corrupt; the Congress party, once that
of Gandhi and nehru, has totally sold out to business. The right-wing
parties that support this guru are religious bigots. Not a great
choice.

In addition to biofuel production (pushed by the US and EU), and large
harvest failures loosely related to global heating (Russia, for
instance), speculation is also part of the cause. So in many
countries are free exploitation treaties that mean local farmers can't
compete with subsidized US farm production — but I don't know
whether that applies to Senegal.

Over the long term,
global heating will make the
problem worse,
and increasing population will push humanity against the limit.
The world must make firm efforts to stabilize
population, as well as stopping global heating.

Going to the airport? Print out 20 copies of
scanners.odt,
cut each sheet into three parts, and hand them out while you wait for
the TSA insecurity check. You could give some to the person in front
of you and say, "Please take one and pass the rest."

The US agreed to subsidize the Brazilian farmers temporarily while
reconsidering the subsidy for US cotton farmers, as demanded by the
WTO.

The WTO decision against US cotton subsidies is a rare occasion where
I agree with the WTO. However, this decision isn't enough to make the
WTO a good thing for humanity. What we really need is a government
not subservient to business; it would end cotton subsidies to
agribusiness for the sake of the rest of the country. One obstacle to
this is the WTO, which generally makes governments more subservient to
business.

The impetus to prohibit assisted suicide in the US comes from
Christianity, and this issue reveals the twisted nature of Christian
morality. I agree with those Christians that murdering you would be
wrong, but their reasons and mine are different. I think it's wrong
for your sake, supposing you want to live. They think it's wrong
because it goes against the orders of their deity.

So what happens if you are in horrible, unending pain and death is
your only way out? Regardless of whether the pain is caused by
illness or state-inflicted torture, I hope you succeed in escaping,
but they go on following the orders of their deity, which say you are
supposed to suffer and suffer and suffer. What you want is of no
importance to them in either case.

It is entirely consistent that many of them think it is wrong to kill
a fetus that isn't a person yet, but don't mind executing adults, and
support policies of torture.

Assisting suicide must be legalized, but until it is, I salute the
heroes that enable incapacitated suffering people to escape.

When private companies demand drug tests of their employees, it may
not be unconstitutional, but it is unjust, and it ought to be
illegal.

Even for safety-critical jobs, drug tests are not justified because
there is a much better solution which is also less intrusive on
people's rights: testing competence at the beginning of the workday.
This is better than drug testing because it detects inability to carry
out the job regardless of the cause (lack of sleep, emotional upset,
sickness, or drugs).

The article falls into a common kind of error when it says that
"possession of child pornography is a heinous offense". It is the
error of rhetorically legitimizing the previous attack against our
rights in arguing against the next one.

This "child pornography" might be a photo of yourself or your lover
that the two of you shared. It might be an image of a sexually mature
teenager that any normal adult would find attractive. What's heinous
about having such a photo?

But even when it is uncontroversial to call the subject depicted a
"child", that is no excuse for censorship. Having a photo or drawing
does not hurt anyone, so and if you or I think it is disgusting,
that is no excuse for censorship.

The government will invent an unlimited number of opportunities to
censor us and search us if we grant the legitimacy of its all-purpose
excuses for doing so.

According to Erzili Danto, "The US canceled visas to get the election
result they wished. They canceled to force the CEP to put Martelly on
the ballot and then later to force the CEP to revise the members of
the Parliament who were elected."

I remain disappointed that Humala said he would respect the free
exploitation treaties, because every country's future depends on
eliminating those. Nonetheless, he is clearly nowhere near as bad
as Fujimori.

Election day in Peru, June 5, is also Dependence Day in Peru: the day
that President Garcia's obedience to US domination led to the murder
of indigenous protesters.

Sharlotte Hydorn has sold hundreds of people simple equipment for painless suicide. The religious torture brigade is looking for some excuse to put her in jail.

Anyone who criticizes this, on the grounds that some people might use it who could benefit from treatment, should be challenged to campaign for a better system for providing these devices. In the mean time, they should leave this one alone.

I don't believe that genetically modified crops are necessarily evil. But if they contain patented genes, that is evil in itself. Also, they need to be tested much more thoroughly than the company which develops them will want to permit. The testing has to include the risk of contaminating other farms in the region.

One way to avoid contamination would be to engineer a change in when the plant flowers. If the modified version flowers two weeks before or after other strains, neither wind nor insects are likely to cross-breed them.

If oil were the only fossil fuel, initiatives like this could suffice to avoid climate disaster. But if ordinary oil deposits are replaced with coal, fracked natural gas, and tar sand oil, it won't achieve that goal.

The low price of fracked natural gas is pushing the world towards that and away from renewable energy. But this will exacerbate global heating, since fracked natural gas releases as much CO2 as burning coal. (Both coal and fracked natural gas are worse than oil.)

I don't do business with most of the organizations that use these. I avoid shrink-wrap software licenses by rejecting all nonfree software on principle. But I can't avoid all these organizations, so the issue is just as important for me as it is for you.

We don't need to know where Cairn Energy keeps its emergency equipment. We do have a right to demand that it answer satisfactorily the claims that an oil spill in those regions cannot be cleaned up.

It is fine that Cairn Energy tows away icebergs. I don't know whether it is possible to tow away even the biggest icebergs under all conditions. I do know that the Big Spill in the Gulf of Mexico happened without icebergs.

It is a good thing to hold these executives responsible if they encouraged the fraud. And if they had the authority and responsibility to prevent the fraud, maybe they are guilty. However, if underlings lied to them, maybe they had no chance to prevent it. It is hard to tell whether the top executives were duped, or whether they preferred not to know.

The demand for a dowry
is partly responsible for this, but also to
blame is the corruption of the Indian government. Don't forget the
world-wide "free trade" system: the jobs that were lost in the US were
replaced by these.

If a raped woman's relatives think of her rape as a loss to them,
rather than taking her side, they don't deserve to be her family.
These women need a chance to start over without the families that
have betrayed them.

Protesters dressed in doctors' coats with fake blood shut down many bank
branches,
accusing the banks of
creating the deficits which are being used
as
an excuse to undermine the National Health Service.

PBS is considering
having commercials four times an hour.
This would continue its drift towards being little different from
television that admits it is "commercial".

However, the commercial connection viewers don't see is more harmful
than the one they see. For decades, PBS programs have received
substantial corporate funds, which they depend on. This gives
corporations influence over their agenda.

Meanwhile, NPR is worried about how money from Soros foundation
might influence the news
but sees no need to worry about money from corporations.

This will help Palestinians who want to leave Gaza for medical
treatment;
Israel will no longer be able to kill them by blocking their exit.
It will also help those who wish to study or move abroad, or go to
conferences, assuming Egypt does not give them trouble about visas.

Doctors that demand patients assign copyright to reviews of their
treatment are
using lies to justify the policy. Maybe they were
lied
to in convincing them to use it.

Even if these contracts would not stand up in court, that doesn't
excuse them.

One additional problem in this copyright agreement is that by using
the term "intellectual property" it claims to apply to a dozen or so
other laws besides copyright. This makes the doctor's demand even
broader.

A requisite for clear thinking about any of these laws is to avoid
lumping them together. So we should never use the term "intellectual
property". Whichever law you want to talk about, best to call it by
its specific name and not confuse it with others.

The Indian government is using a small danger (terrorist attacks as in Mumbai) to increase its control and weaken dissent. That exposes Indians to a much greater danger. The Mumbai attacks killed a few hundred of Indians. Corrupt government farm policies have driven tens of thousands to suicide, and destroyed thousands of tribals from their land.

Web sites in India should call the government evil because of this policy — and should move out of India to a country where they will not be censored.

People in India should resist government monitoring by leaving their wireless networks without passwords.

The Rapescan naked body scanners were never properly tested for safety. The supposed test didn't use the real product. The test can't be repeated because crucial data is missing — as are the names of the people who did it. The software was not checked for safety at all.

This article explains a point that makes these machines potentially very dangerous if they break. They have a high intensity X-ray beam that scans across the body at high speed.

If the scanning mechanism breaks, the beam could remain fixed on one spot in the body, causing a radiation burn.

This article
argues that plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in
one country (the UK in this case) are useless, since they do not count
the emissions made in making goods imported from other countries.

The argument is partly correct: these plans are insufficient. But
that does not make them useless.

To avoid climate disaster requires reducing global emissions, but the
government of one country cannot do much to directly reduce greenhouse
gas emissions in another country. That requires a world-wide
agreement, and the obstacles to that agreement are the US and China.
Plans like these are the most a country can do on its own.

Moving energy generation in one country to renewables is a step
forward independent of what happens elsewhere. And it can also serve
as an example for pressure on the US and China to accept the global
agreement that civilization needs to stop global heating.

I think it is entirely reasonable to treat former secret police as
prisoners of war for the duration, if it seems they might still be
working for Gaddafi now. In war, that is justified. When the war is
over, they can be released, or tried if there is evidence they
committed crimes under Gaddafi's regime.

Drug companies should
not be allowed to fund drug trials directly;
they should pay taxes to the government and the government should
fund them. The experimenters should not be allowed to collaborate
in this research, or its publication, with anyone that has a financial
relationship with the company.

While all indications are that Lagarde would make the IMF as nasty as
possible, I am not sure whether Manuel would be better. His support
comes from countries that are economically strong, not countries that
might be subject to IMF "rescues", and this in itself does not show
us how he would treat those latter.

I am not sure where I stand on this project. I don't know how much
environmental damage it will do, or how much environmental damage it
will avoid. However, Pinera is a right-wing pro-business candidate,
and can't be trusted to protect anything but corporate profits.

This is a different issue entirely from trying to bring aid to Gaza.
The boats that sail to Gaza do not enter Israel unless the Israeli
military forces them to do so. It is also unlike the protests in
Tunisia and Egypt, since those protested in their own country.

These protests seem basically wrong to me because the protesters are
trying to enter Israel, not the West Bank or Gaza. In other words,
entering the territory which, under any reasonable peace settlement,
would not be part of Palestine. In effect, the message of these
protests is to end oppose the existence of Israel, not to end the
occupation.

Israel has the right to control who enters its territory from Syria.
Also, terrorists (they still exist) might infiltrate among the unarmed
protesters. Thus, if nothing else works, the Israeli border guards
must shoot. However, Israel has a duty to try to control entry
without shooting. A stronger wall on the border with Syria might do
the job, but would take time to construct.

If Palestinians would like peace with a state alongside Israel, they
should design their protests to conspicuously support this goal. Only
thus can they refute the Israeli argument that "They still want to
destroy us."

It ignored that
promise, reflecting its intention to stop them from
ever returning home. A Wikileaks cable shows that the UK intended
its marine conservation zone as an additional obstacle to their
return.

There is nothing they wouldn't gladly destroy in their crusade to
maintain their parasitic stranglehold on music. These companies,
which gave us the DMCA and lawsuits against teenagers, don't deserve
any kind of "rights", because what they deserve is to be obliterated.

This hit was certainly intentional; police are good shots, and they
know how tear gas is supposed to be used. They also know that an
"accidental" hit on a person's head can maim or kill.

Last time I was in Israel, I was told that the border police are
especially sadistic. In the same protest, another person's arm was
broken by a tear gas canister. Apparently shooting to maim or kill
is accepted practice.

This is such a vicious tactic I have to wonder whether the claim is a
lie. I won't say the Taliban couldn't possibly do this; but just
because they deserve to be fought does not mean they are totally
without principle. NATO is not above lying.

I also wonder why Noor Mohammad, age 14, is on trial, since he never
attacked anyone. Shouldn't he be in a foster home?

Of course, we should try to make our views heard, but does Obama care?
It would be nice to think so, but I don't believe it. Obama has shown
no sign of championing peace, no will to resist or even criticize the
Israeli policy of slow ethnic cleansing. Our voices can hardly
compete in the mainstream media with the influence that AIPAC's donors
purchase. I think Obama set MJ Rosenberg an impossible challenge to
give himself an excuse to obey AIPAC.

If we consider these operations as war, they are war crimes.
Otherwise, they are extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals who
should have been given a chance to surrender and be arrested.

(If we consider them as war, it doesn't matter whether the Palestinian
fighters we on duty or not. Do the laws of war prohibit attacking
soldiers just because they are not currently fighting? I don't think
so.)

In simple theory, the existence of tiger farms means that wild tigers
can be protected from poaching more easily. It would be enough to
make poaching a tiger more expensive than raising one. With a stable
population of wild tigers, a few could be captured each year for stud
without damaging the wild population. But there may be practical
obstacles that make the reality not fit that theory.

The head of the IMF is
in jail in the US, accused of attempted rape,
and it's not the first such accusation against him.

I have no idea whether he is guilty or not, but it is right to treat
the rich and powerful just like anyone else. However, I think that
the IMF which he heads has done harm far bigger than anything he could
do personally.

The excuse that this is "based on India's criminal law and deal with blasphemous, obscene and defamatory material" is not only inaccurate, it would be no excuse anyway, since it is unjust to make any of those things a crime.

President Saleh's troops shot at protesters in Yemen; then troops of an opposition division moved in and shot back at them.

That division's general opposes Saleh, but I have no idea whether he endorses democracy or human rights, or whether he just wants more power for himself. The situation is full of dangers, one of which is war between the factions of the army.

Wikileaks has done a crucial job for the public. Can that job be done without ugly internal practices such as this contract? Assange seems to believe it can't be. I don't know that he is wrong, but I am not ready to conclude he is right.

Some Democrats defended principles of justice when Bush showed contempt for them. Now that Obama has adopted Bush's opposition to human rights, Americans who defend them are being marginalized and smeared.

I have doubts that the army unit declared as capable of standing on its own can really do so, that the provinces that will be "self-governing" (whatever that means) will be capable. And I am very skeptical of the claim that Afghanistan will be able to do much more with an army of 350,000 than with one of 300,000.

The officer interviewed presents all this as a reason to continue the war for many years. I think it rather demonstrates that there are better things to try to do.

Whether US and European leaders are being honest is one question; whether they have any ethical concern about the issue is another. What these countries ought to do in regard to Libya is a third question, separate from those two.

The West should not throw up its hands and let Gaddafi reconquer Benghazi or Misrata, but its intervention is at once too violent and insufficient. Attacking Gaddafi's family should be off limits regardless of whether Gaddafi is with them.

Meanwhile, the failure to coordinate closely with the Libyan rebels is deadly stupidity. If NATO is determined to launch weapons only from the air, that is no reason not to have forward air controllers and radar on the ground, and even small units to protect them. Gaddafi's success in destroying Mistrara's gasoline supply with bombs from light planes, and the closure of Misrata's port, were possible because of the lack of such coordination.

I am not sure whether the US can validly stand on a deal made 10 years ago by a dictator since removed from power. What does seem clear is that the dictator was dishonest to the Pakistani people in making the deal.

The movie The Longest Day demonstrates that people know how to bomb a train without riding on it. They only need access to the track. The reported tentative al Qa'ida plot involved damaging the track to derail a train. Senator Schumer's Orwellian measure would be useless against that.

I put myself on Amtrak's "no-ride" list when Amtrak started making passengers identify themselves; I'd rather take a bus anonymously. You should, too.

The details of the fight almost don't matter, since the issue is more
of an excuse than anything else. But I do wonder what really happened
to the woman who supposedly converted to Islam. Did she really exist?
If so, is she still alive? Murdered?

This man pretended, in chat rooms, to be a female nurse. Pretending to be what you aren't is not nice, but that has nothing to do with the central issue: just talking with people about suicide is not participating in the event, no matter who you say you are.

As a separate matter, people who want to die should be allowed to get assistance (and not just advice) if they need it. They should be able to get it from people or institutions they can trust, and should not need to have recourse to a chat room. They should also have access to therapy, so that they might reconcile themselves to going on with their lives.

A 14th reason, not mentioned in the article: the law's very goal is wrong.

Sharing is good — to attack sharing is the evil. Thus, any law designed to punish or block file sharing is evil at the root. What New Zealand ought to do is to recognize everyone's right to do noncommercial sharing of exact copies of any published work.

The reason that the government did the opposite, I suggest, is that the government is working for external powers — foreign states and multinational corporations — rather than for the citizens of New Zealand.

In the UK, women buy much more clothing than 20 years ago, and wear most of it very little, treating it as disposable. This is based on, and supports, the use of sweatshop labor to make the clothing.

I would suppose this all applies to the US as well as the UK, but I don't have any way of checking that.

The wasteful production of so much little-used clothing puts a tremendous burden on the Earth.

"Free trade" treaties surely play a role in making these sweatshops possible. In 1990, textile workers in poor countries could organize unions and get better wages; now each poor country has to compete against the rest, driving wages and working conditions down.

I don't see what can be done to stop this stupid game of competition, other than to eliminate the "free trade" treaties that are its basis.

If this is truthful, it would imply that al Qa'ida, or some large part of it, has an overall organization. That does not mean that bin Laden's death is a blow to al Qa'ida. As long as such an organization can recruit, it always has new leaders who can take over from the old.

"Seizing" domains without first convicting their operators of a crime is tyranny. Bravo, Mozilla, for helping the US to resist tyranny.

Some of these sites enable members of the public to share files non-commercially. It's not clear whether those sites have committed a crime in the US, and the US does not prosecute them. What is clear is that, if there is a law that such a site violates, the injustice is in the law, not in the site. The right to share must be respected.

Whether or not Nicole Minetti was involved in finding prostitutes for Berlusconi, he showed disrespect for Italy by giving her a political post after meeting her in a situation that had nothing to do with political ability.

Why then was he shot rather than captured? Supposedly the troops were ordered to take prisoners "when possible". Is their idea of "possible" so cautious that in practice they couldn't possibly have taken any prisoners? Were they really ordered to kill?

The article is mistaken when it says that "no sane person would wish any harm on American soldiers". If a Pakistani feels that way, perhaps in response to the civilians killed by US attacks, that does not make him insane. Fighting a guerrilla war against the US does not make the Taliban insane. I condemned the Taliban's repressive policies when they were in power, I condemn the Taliban's policy of murdering civilians now, and I expect to continue to condemn the Taliban when the US is no longer fighting them, but it is absurd to call enemies "insane" for being enemies.

The "evidence" for this accusation is the sort of false trail you find in page 20 of a mystery novel. As proof, it's nothing, but it might satisfy the desire of some politicians for an excuse to launch a crusade against Anonymous.

Biomass energy projects currently planned are renewable energy sources, but only on the assumption that the forests they chop down will grow back. That is too long a time scale; in the shorter term, these projects can drive massive deforestation.

If the forests do not regrow as supposed, perhaps due to a global heating disaster, these projects will turn out not to have been renewable energy.

Major western media condemned Gaddafi's use of cluster bombs in Misrata.
but didn't condemn the US for using them in Iraq and elsewhere.

This doesn't excuse Gaddafi's use of cluster bombs; rather, it means
that Bush deserves the same condemnation. Bush should be tried for
war crimes and for the crime of aggressive war, just as is now
planned for Gaddafi.

Finding him was a slow process that probably involved combining lots
of information. For absolutely none of this to have been obtained
from the suspects who were tortured would have been unlikely, a
priori. So if some of the information did come from them, that
doesn't prove torture "works".

Even if torture had "worked" in getting a clue that eventually led to
bin Laden, this benefit for the US (for whatever it's worth) would be
nothing compared to the harm the US did to itself by torturing ibn
as-Sheikh al-Libi. He told the
lies that Bush wanted to hear, and
Bush used them as excuses to invade Iraq.

Torture can't "work" in general for getting information from
prisoners, because what it does is make them say what the
interrogators want to hear.

But even if torture did generally "work", that would not justify it.
As Obama said, torture destroys the moral fiber of a nation.
The US's moral fiber seems to be on the edge of tearing right open.

To punish injustice is not the only valid reason not to let this drop.
Another is that
many other prisoners in the US face similar
conditions.
Neither accused suspects nor convicted criminals deserve
to be tortured.

The war in Afghanistan was never about bin Laden, so his death is not
a reason for the US to stop fighting there. However, removing the US
military from Afghanistan is the right thing to do, for other reasons.
If the US pulls out for a non-reason, at least that's
better than not pulling out.

When Obama decided not to use a drone missile against Osama bin Laden,
he made an exception to a general practice of bombing in Pakistan that
has killed far more bystanders than targets.

The article is mistaken when it says that "no sane person would wish
any harm on American soldiers". If a Pakistani feels that way,
perhaps in response to the civilians killed by US attacks, that does
not make him insane. Fighting a guerrilla war against the US does not
make the Taliban insane. I condemned the Taliban's repressive
policies when they were in power, I condemn the Taliban's policy of
murdering civilians now, and I expect to continue to condemn the
Taliban when the US is no longer fighting them, but it is absurd to
call enemies "insane" for being enemies.

Mozilla rejected a request to remove an add-on that helps users access domains that the US attempts to shut down.

"Seizing" domains without first convicting their operators of a crime
is tyranny. Bravo, Mozilla, for helping the US to resist tyranny.

Some of these sites enable members of the public to share files
non-commercially. It's not clear whether those sites have committed a
crime in the US, and the US does not prosecute them. What is clear is
that, if there is a law that such a site violates, the injustice is in
the law, not in the site. The right to share must be respected.

Several associates of Berlusconi will go on trial for finding
prostitutes for him.

Whether or not Nicole Minetti was involved in finding prostitutes for
Berlusconi, he showed disrespect for Italy by giving her a political
post after meeting her in a situation that had nothing to do with
political ability.

I don't know whether the new limit is significantly dangerous. That
may depend on how long this level of radioactivity is likely to last
(which depends on how fast those isotopes decay or get transported
elsewhere). However, dangerous or not, the decision making reflects a
cavalier attitude.

Oil companies are threatening to shut old wells in the UK to avoid an increase in tax.Shutting down some old wells that are almost exhausted won't make a large difference in the long term. The UK should not make long term concessions to this short-term threat.

When Obama declared Bradley Manning guilty, he denied Manning the possibility of a fair trial (supposing any military trial can be fair). Manning's judges will be soldiers under Obama's command, and they have now
been explicitly told what verdict to issue.

The US has finally killed Osama bin Laden.
I don't consider his death any loss, but I don't expect this will do
much harm to al Qa'ida. The only way this might have any important
effect is psychologically: for instance, if al Qa'ida can use him as a
martyr, or if Obama seizes this excuse to withdraw troops from
Afghanistan.
Greg Palast's book, Armed Madhouse, has the following joke.

So Osama walks into this bar, see, and George Bush says, "Whad'l'ya
have, pardner?" and Osama says, "Well, George, what are you serving
today?" and Bush says, "Fear," and Osama says, "Fear for everybody!"
and George pours it on for the crowd. Then the presidential bartender
says, "Hey, who's buying?" Osama points a thumb at the crowd sucking
down their brew. "They are," he says — and the two of them share
a quiet laugh.

NATO's attempt to kill Gaddafi has provoked an international outcry.
It can't be denied that Gaddafi is the head of one of the contending
governments in Libya, and that this was an assassination attempt.

The current rules of war, as established by treaties, forbid
assassination as a method. Some argue for changing this; some argue
for assassination as a less violent substitute for war of armies
against armies. I am not convinced, partly because I think
assassination would be done in addition to war, not instead.

If we do change the rules of war, the change would apply to all the
sides of a conflict. Should the rules of war allow the US try to kill
Gaddafi? Should they allow Gaddafi's army try to kill Obama? It has
to be both yes, or both no.

I wonder what it means for events, being reported rather than carried
out, to contradict Islamic law. Just what is prohibited by this rule?
If a trial in the US gives a female witness equal importance to a male
witness, is that news illegal to report in Saudi Arabia?

New Zealand's new anti-sharing law presumes people are guilty unless
they can prove they are innocent.

Trashing basic principles of justice is standard practice for
governments that serve the movie companies above their citizens.
These companies' goal is to divide people; the means are evil, and the
goal is evil too.

Whatever he may have done in Afghanistan, his response to imprisonment
sounds admirable. His influence over other prisoners, if it really
exists outside the guards' imagination, can't be due to gang violence
as it might be in an ordinary prison. It could only come from moral
leadership.

"Counter-Interrogation" must refer to something like the way The
Prisoner dealt with Number 2.

China's population growth has become less than expected, leading to
lower predictions of energy use and carbon emissions.

The reductions are not enough to make Earth safe, but they show that
efforts to reduce population growth, worldwide, can be of great help
in saving Earth from global heating.

Low birth rates might cause a decrease in human population over the
21st century, which would be a good thing for sustain-ability and
ending poverty. By the end of the century we should be able to
greatly extend human life span, so the population will start rising
again; but we will have more advanced technology to cope with the
consequences of that rise.

It is unfortunate that the article uses the term "intellectual
property issues", since that term lumps copyright law together
with a dozen unrelated disparate laws.

Perhaps he was quoting from the cable, but he didn't write it as a
direct quotation so he did not have to use these words. And if it had
been a direct quotation, the term's misguided view calls for rebuttal
as I'm doing here.

Gaddafi is not trustworthy in general, but I don't think this is a
lie. I don't see any plausible scenario where this lie would fit and
stand up. Nor is it plausible he would carry out a false flag attack
against his own progeny. So I believe this report. It seems NATO is
trying to assassinate him.

The piece talks have been mere theater —
giving Israel cover as
it grabs more pieces of the West Bank.
But the
Palestinian Authority refused
last year to continue the theater any longer.
It appears Israel has switched to a different kind of theater,
"rejecting" talks that were not in the cards anyway. I think this
means Israel expects international pressure to make peace and is planning
in advance to reject it.

To completely eliminate mosquitos, as is also proposed, would be an
insane ecological risk. Many amimals eat mosquitos and could be wiped
out too. The kind of experiments they are talking about would not be
sufficient to measure the danger of this.

I condemn Hamas's Islamist ideology, but Palestinians cannot have
democracy by excluding a party that many Palestinians support.

There is no reason for Fatah to care what the Israeli government or
the US government says or thinks about this. As Uri Avnery has
explained,
Netanyahu's "peace negotiations" are an
intentional dead end, meant
as a cover for a continuing land grab. Netanyahu's terms for peace
are that if Palestinians concede everything, then Israel will give
them nothing. Thus, the real choice for Fatah is peace with Hamas or
nothing.

Hamas's election victory came after Fatah (which is secular) had been
weakened by many years of uselessly begging Israel for peace. It has
ceased to do that, so Hamas may lose some of its appeal. The success
of secular resistance to dictatorship in several Arab countries, and
the strength it has demonstrated in others, might show Palestinians
that Islamism is not the only path that could possibly win them
justice.

Women in Bangladesh are challenging the power of Islamists by supporting full implementation of a general law giving women equal rights. If that law is implemented, Bangladesh will do the US one better.

It amazes me that bullying so often goes as far as death threats.
Things seem to have changed a lot since I was young; bullies bothered
me but never threatened to kill me. Saying "sticks and stones will
break my bones" is not enough, apparently, to deal with this.

The US government tries to justify torture and injustice in the name
of protecting Americans. Don't you dare torture in my name!

The US government argues for keeping innocent people in prison because
if freed they might seek revenge for their imprisonment. How would
you feel if a callous government kept you in prison because it had
done you an injustice? That is the behavior of a monstrous juggernaut
that needs to be stopped.

If you have done someone a great wrong, and you don't want him to seek
revenge, you ought to give him a very humble apology, together with a
convincing demonstration that you won't do such things any more. Show
you have learned your lesson. That is what the US must do.

A scientific paper reporting apparent evidence of precognition was
published and then drew widespread media coverage. A repetition of
the study, which found no sign of precognition, was refused publication.

The situation in Libya has not yet reached a clear stalemate.
Gaddafi's troops continue attacking because they still think they can
win (whether or not they really can). If they become certain they
cannot win, that they can never again dominate Libya and profit from
its oil, that's when many of them will look for a way to get out.

Dropbox says it will decrypt users' files for the government, which
means they must have been lying when they said they couldn't decrypt
users' files.

The article's first paragraph states misguided judgments and
irrelevancies. It makes no difference how "passionate" their team is;
what matters is how they treat their users. This service is not a
product. No product or service can be "great" if it implements
surveillance.

However, that doesn't invalidate the main points of the article. If
you're going to use Dropbox, you should encrypt the files first on
your own machine.

Mukhtar Mai was gang-raped as a punishment for her brother. She
became a women's rights campaigner and prosecuted her attackers.
Most of them were freed on appeal, and now she is afraid they will kill her.

UK police raided a squat in Bristol, triggering a protest. During the
protest they ran amok, attacking protesters and passers-by at random.

Meanwhile the protest developed into a riot. I can't tell from the
information in this article whether the police brutality was a reaction
to the riot or its cause.

I don't see anything very bad about another Tesco convenience store.
It would be better if it were independent, not part of a large chain,
to increase competition and reduce concentration of wealth. But I
would not feel like protesting such a store. It's the police that
deserve to be protested.

The police accused the squatters of making "petrol bombs". The
squatters deny those charges, and say they were not even part of the
opposition to the Tesco store.

Is there any physical difference between petrol bombs "assembled" for
use at a later time, and a collection of beverage bottles to be
recycled? Anyway, the accusation seems implausible. Given how easy
it is to break store windows, why would anyone plan to commit arson
instead? Police are not known for scrupulous adherence to the truth.

Based on prior patterns, I predict that people who smashed the Tesco
store windows will be sentenced to prison, while police that attacked
and injured bystanders will not be prosecuted.

Japan limits public information about the Fukushima disaster.
Most press conferences include only the major Japanese corporate media,
which repeat what they are told and ask no probing questions.
Moreover, there are new threats of censorship of others that publish
"illegal information".

This raises a nice ethical question: is it ethical to say there will
be a protest at XYZ Square and cause some people strolling there to
get arrested?

It has the effect of hurting innocent people, but the harm is done by
the agents of tyranny, and nothing except their tyrannical goals
requires them to do it. My conclusion is that if the people are only
arrested, not maimed or killed, it is ethical.

European music publishers shut down the IMSLP public domain music
score library with a bogus copyright claim.

That their claim was bogus made no difference because there was no
trial.

Go-Daddy has participated in a number of denial of service attacks,
and it seems that people should refuse to do business with it. But
that will not deal with the underlying problem: that use of the
Internet is precarious and anyone can be kicked off by intimidation.

The article's point is that rather than directing growth into an
expanding middle class, with the false promise that everyone will get
to join it later, Asian countries must direct some of the increase in
wealth to reducing the poverty of the poor.

With 1000 people killed by Gaddafi's shelling, and snipers who shoot
at anyone they can see, it is clear that attacking Gaddafi's army is
authorized by the UN resolution that called for protecting civilians.

Former president Alvaro Horrible claimed to have demobilized them, but
some of his close associates were connected with them. It was also
Horrible who negotiated the proposed Free Exploitation Treaty than Obama
now wants to ratify.

Each note starts with a date and a brief topic in parentheses. That
text is also a link to that note.
For instance, if the note
starts with "20 July 2003 (Iraq)" then you can link to it with
"https://stallman.org/notes/may-aug-03.html#20 July 2003 (Iraq)".